


Angry Young Man

by justheretobreakthings



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Foster Care, Galaxy Garrison, Gen, I'll be continually adding tags as I go, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-05-01 04:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14512767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: Keith knew he had a temper. He knew that it was a problem, and he knew the way it made people view him. Short-tempered, volatile, ready to explode at just the right provocation. A troublemaker always itching for a fight, scowl on his face, mad at the world. People saw this, and as much as he hated to admit it, they weren’t wrong. He just wished it wasn’t the only thing people ever saw.But he can’t fault them for it. After all, it’s easier to dismiss him as the hothead than it is to take a closer look.(Thirteen moments from Keith’s life stretching from childhood to Naxzela)





	1. Chapter 1

The people kept telling him, over and over, that it was okay to be scared. Social workers, they called themselves, or maybe just the one lady was a social worker and the others were something else. One of them had a walkie-talkie, so he might have been a police officer. Keith didn’t know for sure. There was too much going on, too quickly, too loudly. He couldn’t focus enough on anything to really get a firm grasp on what was going on.

What he did know for certain was that one moment he had been on the highway, stretched across the back seat of the car, his stuffed hippopotamus pressed against the door and himself curled on top of it as if it were a pillow, his dad in the driver’s seat, the radio turned on low and tuned in to some classic rock station that kept getting muffled by static, slowly moving out of range.

And then the next moment, he wasn’t.

He didn’t even really remember the moment of the crash itself; he might have dozed off before it occurred. But he certainly remembered the seconds immediately following, him gasping and struggling to wrench himself away from the folded-in car door pinning him to his seat and hurting his arm, trying not to panic at the crimson rivulet that he could feel dripping down his face from his forehead and could see staining the fur of his hippo, calling out to his dad in the front seat, his dad who wasn’t answering and wasn’t moving and  _why wasn’t he moving?_

The driver of the truck who had hit them must have been the one who had called the ambulance and police, because there they were, pulling a dazed Keith out of the wreckage and checking him for injuries, holding something to his head and telling him to try not to move his arm. He tried to shake them away, tell them to focus on dad instead, since he was probably worse off; he had seen them pulling his dad out of the car as well, but he hadn’t seen anyone treating him. He ended up nearly shouting at the emergency workers, demanding to know why no one seemed to be helping dad.

They told him why, later on.

Keith was at that age when he was old enough to understand what death meant, but not old enough yet to fully grasp the gravity of someone leaving and never, ever being able to come back. People were supposed to come back. After all, this wasn’t the first time he’d lost a parent – his earliest memory was a hazy picture of his mother telling him she had to go, telling him to be good while she was gone – but his dad had always told him that she’d be back, eventually; he just had to keep collecting those photos from the telescopes and listening to those radios and watching the green dots on the screens piled haphazardly in his “office”. Keith had never really understood how exactly all of that was supposed to bring mom home, but dad just seemed so very sure of himself, and worked so hard, so he hadn’t questioned it.

It wasn’t until the memorial service that it really hit him. The memorial was small. Tiny. It seemed almost pointless to have one at all, really. Keith and his dad had mostly kept to themselves, in their little house miles outside of town – if the minuscule watering hole they would occasionally drive out to in order to get groceries or tools or grab a diner meal on special occasions or check their mail, and there was never any mail, could really be called a town – and they hadn’t gotten much opportunity to get close to the few people who lived nearby, certainly not close enough for anyone to be so affected by his loss that it would be worth their time to put on a nice dress or a suit and tie and come out to solemnly reminisce and offer condolences.

The little service must have been more for Keith’s sake than his dad’s, though, since the social worker whose house he’d been staying at for the last few days was one of the few attendees, along with her colleagues, the ones who kept asking him questions and telling him not to worry and who wouldn’t just leave him alone. A little handful of other mourners were there; Keith didn’t recognize any of them, but he wasn’t great at remembering faces.

He had kept himself together at first, while they’d gotten dressed and driven out to town, to the little country church that was just eight pews and a pulpit, where Keith and his dad were not members but whose reverend had volunteered the space as a goodwill gesture toward the grieving, and who probably wasn’t even aware that the grieving family was just one kid not much older than a toddler.

Most of the funeral-like atmosphere didn’t get to him, not the muted colors or the lowered voices or the fact that no one around him was smiling. It was the photograph. In lieu of any funeral plan or will, because no one had been able to find either, they – and he didn’t know who  _they_  were; the many adults in uniforms and with name badges and carrying folders who flitted in and out of his vision in those few hectic days were just  _they_  – had decided on cremation, rather than bothering with embalming or burial or some ridiculous, garrish headstone, so rather than a casket, on display was an urn and a framed photograph. Keith easily recognized the photograph from their house, since they didn’t have many, and he found himself fixated on it, staring into his dad’s forever unblinking eyes.

Besides that one blurry wisp of a memory, Keith had never really seen his mom. Only a photograph of her. And a photograph hardly really showed anything. Moments frozen in time, instances within occasions that someone wanted to capture somehow, so that they wouldn’t forget, but which they inevitably forgot anyway. And now, suddenly, that was the only way he’d see his dad, too. The only way he’d ever be able to see him again.

Just little glimpses, forever. They’d only ever had a handful of photographs, only of his dad and himself – mom must have been the one who always took the pictures – and as far as Keith was aware, the only one with his mom was the one he had found in his dad’s desk drawer months back and that had disappeared by the next time he looked for it. It had been a photo of the three of them together, him and his mom and his dad, the two of them standing together, him held against his mother’s hip, too young to even understand that he was supposed to smile at the camera, but he was looking toward it anyway, curious about the buttons and lights. His mom looked strange in that photograph; maybe she had been in a costume or facepaint or maybe the shadows and lighting had just hit her very oddly when the picture was snapped. It didn’t matter, really. It was still the family photograph. The one photograph in existence where they looked the way a family was supposed to. A copy of a copy of a copy of a family captured in a fraction of a fraction of a moment in time.

Keith started to shake, right there in the middle of that pathetic excuse for a memorial, staring unflinchingly at the image of his dad. He was feeling numb, feeling ill, feeling like something in him was going to burst, and far away a voice was telling him to breathe, just breathe, it will be okay, just breathe. And the stupid church was so  _small_ , and it was getting smaller, and the walls were coming toward him and the roof was coming down and he was going to be crushed under wooden rafters and stained glass.

He might have been crying when the social worker pulled him aside and tried to help him calm down. He couldn’t remember. He might have cried later, when they were at his house finishing off sorting the furniture and belongings that would go to auction, that would be scrapped, and that would go to Keith to take with him, wherever it was he was going. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do now, who he was supposed to turn to, why this was happening, how his mom would find him if dad wasn’t collecting those readouts and watching the stars.

It was all so much, and it made his knees weak and his stomach tight and he kept hearing his own heartbeat. And the social worker said this was good, it was okay to be scared, it was okay to let it out, he wouldn’t be able to stop being scared until he was able to understand and admit that he  _was_ scared, that he was ready to come to terms with everything, that he was willing to reach out for their help and protection.

But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be comforted and soothed, he wanted it to be  _fixed_. He wanted to go back to normal, back to just him and dad, back to before these people were messing up their house and back to when he didn’t feel queasy every time he ate and he didn’t wake up tangled in his sheets because he couldn’t stop tossing and turning and back to when he knew what was coming next and where he was going. He was sagging under an enormous weight but also on his toes waiting for something else to go wrong, something else to change or disappear, and the feeling was inside him pressing outward and outside him pressing inward and he couldn’t rein it in, couldn’t figure out how.

They’d gone to his bedroom, opened up his bureau drawers to gather his clothes and toss aside whatever he had outgrown. They collected his toys and asked him which ones he wanted to keep. The ones he wanted were put in a bag, the ones he didn’t want were placed in two piles, donate and throw out.

The process was simple, all nods and head shakes, and there should have been no problems. And there weren’t, up until one of the workers picked up the stuffed hippo and didn’t turn to Keith, didn’t hold it up for him to decide its fate, just placed it in the ‘throw out’ pile.

Wait, Keith had said, stretching his shaking hands out toward the pile. I need that.

They told him he didn’t need it, couldn’t keep it. It was covered in blood from the wreck. It was crusty and dyed unevenly in black and red and smelled like rust. They could buy him a new hippo, a brand new plush hippo that wasn’t blood-soaked. And that wasn’t a gift from his first birthday, a prized possession that he clung to as a security blanket.

I don’t want a new hippo, he told them, I want that one.

Still they told him no, told him the new one they’d buy for him would be just as good, if not better, and they decided they were finished with his room. They were zipping bags closed and double-checking to make sure they’d gotten everything, and the social worker took him by the hand and started to tug him out of the room.

And that’s when he started screaming.

He screamed and ran for ‘throw out’ bag, and kept screaming when the social worker grabbed him around the waist to hold him back, telling him to calm down, everything’s okay, and having to shout in an attempt to be heard above the screams. Keith didn’t listen. He kicked at her, thrashed in her arms to try to get away, reaching out toward the man holding the bag, who was wide-eyed, at a total loss for what to do.

The screams had been wordless at first, but that didn’t seem to be getting the message across, so he soon transitioned into words. Give it back, he screamed. Give it back, you can’t take it, it’s not yours. Long arms tried to intervene, and he fought them off, punching and scratching at anything he could reach, snarling between his screams, ready to tear down anything or anyone who dared to stand between him and his toy. His throat was beginning to hurt, his eyes were watering, but he didn’t care, he just kept screaming, give it back give it back  _give it back!_

One of them finally relented, pulled the hippo out of the ‘throw out’ bag and shoved it into Keith’s arms, and at the reprimands, insisted that this was just temporary, they could throw it away later, just let him keep the stupid thing until they could replace it so they didn’t all go deaf or run the risk of Keith scratching someone’s eye out in his tantrum.

He finally quieted once the stuffed animal was back in his possession, and he was exhausted and red-faced and sniffling and still refused to look at any of the people around him with anything other than a scowl, but he felt… better. The way one feels less sick after they throw up. He wasn’t back to normal, not even close, but the tight knots in his stomach had loosened just a bit, the world around him a little less hazy. It was good, empowering, to have that moment of control.

It almost seemed ridiculous that his brain and his body would have wasted so much energy being terrified. Unfocused and looming and useless, a feeling that he couldn’t quite comprehend, that eluded his grasp even as it barraged him endlessly. Not until he lashed out had he been able to steady himself. Anger made sense. Anger he could direct, he could get a handle on, and he didn’t like exploding at them, didn’t like the looks they gave him when he was screaming or the way they edged around him afterward like he was a ticking bomb, but for just a moment he got that suffocating fog to clear. He channeled his fear into fire, and it felt good.

He knew the damage that fire could do if he wasn’t careful around it, but he had it, that Hail Mary he could turn to if he needed the world to right itself, a failsafe. One that was always churning somewhere under the surface and that he would only have to let loose, just for a little bit, and then it would be okay. That was the realization he reached:

It’s easier to feel angry than it is to feel scared.


	2. Chapter 2

The destruction of stability in Keith’s life that came with the loss of his dad was nothing compared to that which arrived as he found himself in the foster system. He started out in what they called a transitional home, a house meant to be only a temporary placement until they found something more solid for him. He was there with five others, and wound up sharing a room with the only other boy in the house.

Keith wasn’t a particularly social child. It may have just been his nature, or it may be a result of him simply not getting much opportunity to try, since in the past his time spent around other people consisted almost entirely of time with his dad, and they were often perfectly content to just be in the same room together, even if they weren’t talking, if it was just Keith sitting on the floor with a picture book or his plastic train tracks and Dad sitting at his screens or telescope until his eyes burned. So being thrust into a group of all these other kids, these kids who were louder than Keith, wilder than Keith, was a lot to handle.

He made an effort. Sort of. To the extent that he didn’t actually physically slap his hands over his ears when the others got too loud or blatantly turn a cold shoulder when another kid would try to talk to him – which they didn’t do often. The boy in the top bunk in the bedroom they shared would complain about how Keith would ignore him or glare at him, and Keith hadn’t even realized that he was doing either of those things.

He had to sit in when his social worker came to meet with the foster parents who ran this house, to discuss how Keith was doing and how far along they were in the process of finding him a more permanent resident. They talked about his behavior and personality as well, mostly in clinical terms and long words that Keith didn’t understand, so he could never quite follow what they were saying about him. He’d been in too isolated an environment, he had not been exposed to enough healthy activities for someone his age, he showed some early symptoms of a couple of genetic disorders but they could not find any family history to compare to, he had never been properly socialized.

They might as well have been speaking in another language for all Keith could gather from what the social worker was saying, but by the tones and expressions of everyone, he could at least assume that he wasn’t being complimented.

Whatever it was, it was apparently the reason it took them a while to find another home for him. The social worker informed him that he was  _challenging_ and  _unique_  and they just needed to find foster parents who were ready for that.

But they did their best, Keith was assured, and eventually, a week after the school year of what be first grade for him started, he was placed in foster home number one of many, with a couple who were experienced with  _challenging_ cases and whose large house, already full to bursting, always had room for one more.

Unfortunately, placing the kid who didn’t know how to socialize and was intimidated by crowds into a house full of other challenging kids, all with their own various difficulties and all older and bigger than Keith, turned out not to work. The foster parents made a valiant effort to keep things running and under control, but they couldn’t watch eight different foster kids at once at all times, and the kids in the group whose definition of being challenging included the fact that they got a kick out of ‘messing with’ people and giving them a good scare pegged Keith for an easy target.

Keith didn’t really know what was considered normal in a older sibling-younger sibling relationship, so he didn’t put up a fuss when they explained to him that getting shoved into a wall or yanked around by the hair was just part of family roughhousing, or told him about the ‘little brother tax law’ that required him to pass along his spending allowance to the others or risk being thrown in prison, or informed him that toy-sharing privileges had to be earned by completing tests of fortitude that would consist of tasks such as spending the night in the backyard or skipping food for two days.

It was about seven months later that Keith approached his foster mother to request a raise in his allowance so he could still have some left after the tax, and that was when they finally realized what was going on.

He never did find out how or whether his foster siblings ended up being punished; he just knew that he was pulled from that house as soon as possible, so his social worker could sit him down and explain what had happened and what was and was not okay for brothers and sisters to do.

Then he wound up in home number two. Only two other kids in this house, but Keith was on his guard. He had only a single frame of reference for what foster siblings were like, and he wanted nothing to do with them. He took to hiding out when others were around, either by shutting himself into his room or folding into other hiding places like in closets or under beds or tables.

They held out for the remainder of the school year and through the summer before this set of foster parents conceded that he hadn’t been improving, that this setup clearly wasn’t working for him. That he wasn’t comfortable developing his social skills here and would probably be better off elsewhere.

He was placed in home number three, a home where for the first time it was just him and the foster parents. And this one seemed like it might work out. They weren’t great; they were cautious as they went, and there was a disconnect there, little familiarity or emotion between them, like they were Keith’s babysitters rather than parents. But they also weren’t bad, helped him with homework and kept reasonable house rules and packed good lunches.

It was working, and perhaps if they’d had longer for Keith to fully begin to feel comfortable with them and really cement a relationship it could have worked for a long time, but it didn’t. Because some bad patches of ice on the road over winter break left the household short one foster mother and with one new widower who didn’t feel he could handle parenting alone.

Keith was growing frustrated. Three times now he’d had to uproot himself and start from scratch, try to adjust to a new house, be the new kid in school, be lost and disoriented in a new environment. He had yet to stay in one house long enough for it to start to feel like a home, he had yet to stay in one school long enough to make friends.

In home number four he didn’t bother to try. He was just exhausted, he just needed a break. He didn’t let himself feel settled in the house, he didn’t let other kids try to draw him into their circle of friends because he knew he wouldn’t be in it long. The foster parents put in the work, tried to get those gradually-building defenses to come down, but they were unsuccessful, and when it came time for them to decide whether they wanted to continue fostering Keith or whether they thought he’d do better elsewhere, they gave exactly the answer Keith expected.

Home number five introduced Keith to the first set of foster parents he actively disliked. He told his social worker that they were too strict and demanding, that they were always upset with him, that they were mean. Considering that this was also the time disciplinary problems starting coming up with him at school, his case worker was not surprised that his current guardians saw fit to use a firm hand with Keith.

Of course, when his teacher reported seeing unusual bruising on his arms and the school nurse questioned him about it, they figured out that this firm hand was much more literal than it should have been.

He was nervous around the foster parents in home number six, afraid of some sort of repeat experience, always jumpy and on the defense when he wasn’t scowling and suspicious. They decided that they weren’t going to be able to make this work when Keith still had his guard up just as steadfastly two months later, saying they weren’t going to make him stay if he was that reluctant to trust him.

His foster mother in house number seven was prepared to work with his skittishness, to take as long as she needed to gain Keith’s trust, but she wasn’t prepared for his ever-growing aggression. That came to a head when Keith was suspended from school after getting into a fight against two other students that culminated in him breaking two of his fingers, and a window.

House number eight had him for only three weeks before declaring he wasn’t a good fit. It was also the house where Keith stopped keeping count.

It became a rut, a pattern that he could not break out of. He’d be sent somewhere, and he knew he’d be sent away again soon, so he didn’t bother trying; he didn’t bother trying, so he’d end up being sent away. Round and round and round and round.

He hated it. And when he got tired enough of trying to keep his composure, he would let the world know it.

There was one house where he got close. So close. Within an inch of his fingertips. Shortly before beginning seventh grade, he was placed with a family that he almost thought could eventually become his own. The parents were nice, social without pushing him beyond what he could handle, seemed to quickly manage to adapt their approach to Keith whenever one of his myriad  _challenging_  traits made itself known. The mother was a mechanic, the father a graphic designer, each would let him watch them work and guide him through and explain what they were doing.

He stayed with them for the entirety of the school year, and he wanted it to work, wanted to make it work.

And it might have, if they hadn’t already had their own biological son who did not take to Keith well. He preferred being an only child, didn’t like watching his parents coddle someone else. He could never figure out how to hang out with Keith without making it awkward and forced, he didn’t have anything remotely in common with him, and he loathed being so closely tied to the school’s ‘weird kid,’ people thinking that maybe he was temperamental and aggressive too just like his ‘brother’.

When the school year came to its close, the family had to make the decision of whether to continue hosting Keith, to make him a permanent part of the family. And they agreed that a decision for him to stay would have to be unanimous; they wouldn’t want to commit to Keith unless everyone in the family was happy and comfortable with it.

He knew what the decision was going to be, but it didn’t lessen the sting when he was told that they had loved having him around, but they didn’t think this was an arrangement they could keep up.

Their own son’s stance was worth a hell of a lot more than Keith’s. Family first, right?

He was running on a particularly short fuse the day he packed up to move out and head off to his umpteenth home. Snapping at his no-longer-foster parents and the social worker who picked him up, bitter and moody and speaking mostly in grunts and glares. Their son had been off with friends that day, but returned right in time to see his parents and Keith hauling luggage out to the car.

Keith’s packing up? he asked, and his father answered in the affirmative as he helped Keith haul his dufflebag into the backseat of the car.

Good, the boy said with a grin. I was starting to think he was never gonna leave.

And Keith snapped. In a flash, Keith was no longer beside the car packing his bags. He was at the top of the driveway, breathing hard and standing over the knocked-over form of the other boy, fist clenched and raised and throbbing from where it had punched him in the face, and he stood stock-still, staring at the boy’s shocked expression and the blood starting to pool out of his nose and the spot on his cheek that was already darkening in what was sure to end up being a fantastic bruise.

Everyone was frozen for a moment, in shock, in disbelief, before the boy let out a yell and retaliated, bringing up his legs to kick at Keith, shoving him into the garage door.

It became a brawl in an instant. Both boys scraping skin off against the concrete of the driveway as they went at each other. They were rapidly becoming bloody and bruised and disheveled, but Keith didn’t care; the only thing on his mind was how badly he wanted some sort of retaliation against the person who had ruined the best chance he’d ever had at family.

He had no concept of time during the scuffle, so he didn’t know how long it took before he and the boy were pried apart, the father holding his son back, the mother and social worker tightly grabbing one of Keith’s arms each to keep him in place. He was shoved toward the car with a strict demand to get into his seat and stay put, and he did so, slamming the door shut and crossing his arms over his chest as he watched the others talk. The social worker was looking distressed, exaggerating her arm movements, probably apologizing profusely for Keith’s behavior.

He looked away, kept his eyes fixed on his feet and waited out the talking until the social worker finally joined him in the car, taking the driver’s seat and heading off. She wasted no time laying into him, telling him how dare he end his time at the foster home like that, what was he thinking assaulting another kid, how lucky he was that they were willing to forgive the incident, how this was what was eventually going to land him in juvie if he didn’t get his act together right now.

As she talked, he stared stubbornly out the window, teeth clenched, the way he shook in rage disguised by the motion of the car, his face red, his hands curling into fists and uncurling again on his knees. He tried to take deep and slow breaths to calm himself, tried to force his thoughts elsewhere, tried to let the whole thing slide off of him. But he couldn’t.

It's easier to feel angry than it is to feel unwanted.


	3. Chapter 3

And then, things got better. Not good, not exactly, but better.

His science class had had a group of guest speakers come to visit. Representatives of the Galaxy Garrison. A couple of commanding officers, as well as a student ambassador. They came to talk to the class about the Garrison’s space exploration programs, its research facilities, and, finally, its school, the programs it offered to high-school-aged kids to get them on track to become pilots and engineers and technicians and biologists and even astronauts, all under the Garrison name.

Keith stayed quiet during the presentation. He was huddled into the back corner of the classroom, as was his usual. The back row so no one could jab him in the back with a pencil or kick at his chair or throw wads of paper at the back of his head or stick anything into his hair, and the far side of the classroom so he could look out the window rather than at the others in the room.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t pay attention during the presentation. He kept his head down, kept his expression disinterested, so the guest speakers wouldn’t try to call on him for anything and none of his classmates would notice how intrigued he was and find some way to twist that into something he deserved to be made fun of for, but he was listening all the same.

He had never given much thought to his future, beyond surviving until he was eighteen and then leaving the foster system as far behind him as humanly possible, but piloting spacecraft seemed… fitting. He loved the sensation of flying, as he’d learned early on in his life from sitting on his dad’s lap as they rode the hoverbike across the sand. He loved the stars, could stare at them for hours through his dad’s telescope if he could. He loved the idea of outer space, where it was quiet and vast and beautiful and he could be above the world and it wouldn’t matter that he was tiny and insignificant because everyone and everything else was too.

The guest speakers weren’t just there to give them a history lesson about the Garrison. They were there to recruit. In the coming school year, the kids in this class would be old enough to enter the Garrison as first-year cadets, and the students were encouraged to look into the Galaxy Garrison and, if they thought it would be a good fit for them, apply.

And Keith did.

He heard people saying when he got into the school that he was something of a prodigy, just bursting with innate talent. And that might have been part of it, sure. But the people who were delighted by his supposed natural talent hadn’t seen how much time and energy and focus he had poured into preparing for that entrance exam. For months he pored over every book and text he could find that was tangentially related to any subject the Garrison would want him to know, studied star charts and diagrams detailing the anatomy of spacecrafts, dug up video tutorials online that wouldn’t even come close to the Garrison’s simulators but that could at least give him a taste.

He knew that he was a long shot. His grades in school weren’t bad, but they weren’t stellar either, and then of course there was the matter of his disciplinary record. To top it all off, there was no way in Hell that he would ever find a way to pay the tuition costs for the school, so not only did he need to pass the entrance exam to get in, he needed to do well enough to earn a scholarship, and a full-tuition one at that.

Keith was a great pilot, yes, he realized it along the way. But he didn’t become the top of the class to show up the other cadets or to get a leg-up on his career or to bask in the approval of the Garrison officers; he clawed his way to the top because he  _had_  to.

Still, the fact that he made it to the top of the class in terms of academics and piloting abilities didn’t mean that settling into the student body of the Galaxy Garrison was easy for him.

It wasn’t the piloting that he had trouble with; it was the school environment itself. Every student had that transitional period when they first started at the Garrison when they had to grow accustomed to living and learning in a military-operated academy, and for the first week or so, everyone would be squirming in their itchy uniforms and forgetting to salute the commanding officers and feeling claustrophobic in their dormitories and loudly bemoaning how early the reveille played. Once that first week had passed, though, the students would settle in, start to reflect their status as Garrison students.

Keith, though, didn’t start to feel at home in the Garrison the way the others around him did. Some of it just seemed like petty rebellion that was little more than an annoyance, like his staunch refusal to get a sensible haircut and his inability to get back to his room any earlier than ten minutes after curfew. Some of it was indicative of poor social skills, like the fact that he almost never would speak up during class or the way that, while all the other students had started getting to know each other and form their cliques and bonds, Keith still would only ever eat his meals in a far corner of the mess hall, alone, head down, silent.

He didn’t fit in. He had long since grown accustomed to that feeling, as he always was the odd one out in every new foster family, every group home, every school. It didn’t make it less painful to feel that way again, and here at the academy he’d worked so hard to get into and that was supposed to be a launching point for his dream career and where he should have been able to make things work, and if he couldn’t even find a way to not feel out of place at the Galaxy Garrison then he really ought to give up on ever expecting to fit in anywhere, but it wasn’t as if he had any better opportunities on the horizon or anywhere else to go or anything else he could possibly do with himself, so he may as well just grit his teeth and try to power through this with his head down and without causing too many problems along the way.

And he may have done just that, if it hadn’t been for the upperclassman who took notice.

He had jumped in surprise when someone had, for the first time, actually sat down across the table from him in the mess hall, asking nonchalantly whether this seat was taken, even though it clearly wasn’t, it never was. Keith didn’t even answer him, just stared warily at this other student, a student who seemed vaguely familiar even though Keith couldn’t for the life of him put his finger on how, who seemed to interpret Keith’s silence as an invitation to set his tray down and take a seat and start talking.

The student asked Keith whether he was enjoying the Garrison so far, how were his classes, did he like his dorm, was he getting to know his way around, did he get along with his classmates, what did he think of his instructors. Keith answered with nods and headshakes whenever he could, and with one-word answers when he couldn’t. It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for him to finally place why this upperclassman looked familiar, and he blurted out that he recognized him, that he was the student ambassador who had come to visit his science class.

He blushed when he realized he had cut the other off mid-sentence in order to make his proclamation, but, fortunately, the upperclassman didn’t seem to have minded. Instead he nodded, said that yes, that had been him, and introduced himself as Takashi Shirogane. He then mentioned that he had seen Keith’s simulator scores, that they were very impressive, especially for a cadet as new as Keith. They even beat out Shirogane’s own early scores.

Keith’s blush deepened and he slumped down onto the hard cafeteria bench, bracing himself to listen to Shirogane ramble about beginner’s luck or tell him not to get cocky on account of a couple of flukes or maybe even accuse him of cheating like some of his classmates had, but he didn’t. He just congratulated him and continued to eat, reminiscing between bites about his few weeks at the Garrison, seeming unbothered by Keith’s lack of input into the conversation.

When Shirogane finally finished his lunch, stood from the table, shook Keith’s hand with a remark about how he hoped he’d see Keith around again sometime, Keith figured that this was going to be the end of it. The first and last time he talked to the Garrison’s golden boy, the first and last time someone actually went out of their way to try to be friendly with him.

So he was surprised when, the day several upperclassmen joined the cadets in the simulator course to give pointers and demonstrations, he found himself at Shirogane’s side again. And the older student actually remembered Keith, picked up on their chat where they’d left off as if no time had passed in between.

And Keith had even tried to hold his half of the conversation this time. When Shirogane asked him about his hobbies, he actually mumbled a little about enjoying books and animals and biking instead of shrugging wordlessly, and in some strange whirlwind this brought Keith into the student garage staring in awe at Shirogane’s own hoverbike, which he even demonstrated for Keith.

They talked. They spent time together. Shirogane told Keith to call him Shiro, and he did.

Each time they ran into each other after that came as less and less of a surprise to Keith. He still didn’t know what it was that had made Shiro take an interest in him. Maybe one of the commanding officers had saddled him with Keith duty in an effort to help keep Keith’s disciplinary issues in line. Maybe one of his classmates had cajoled him into saying hi to the weird kid, maybe even dared him. Maybe Shiro was keeping an eye out for a protégée and was testing the waters with the first new cadet he’d found with no social life to get in the way.

Whatever the case was, surely it wasn’t going to last. Keith kept waiting for the moment Shiro got bored of him, or decided he had filled his quota of spending time with him and now had to get back to his own life, or realized that talking him down from bouts of anger and comforting him through moments of panic and walking him through projects and assignments that had Keith tearing his hair out from stress simply was not worth the amount of time he was investing, and Keith wouldn’t have blamed him for that, would have accepted it, would have seen it coming from miles away.

But, somehow, that moment never came.

Keith wasn’t proud of the fact that he found himself growing dependent on Shiro. It was just so new, so exciting, to have someone around who was interested in him for reasons besides it being their job or him being a source of income from the state or them thinking it was simply their moral obligation to help out a troubled soul. Suddenly someone in his life was actually believing him when he told them that he hadn’t been the one to throw the first punch in that fight. Someone was giving him a pat on the back for his accomplishments, taking him out for burgers when he aced an exam he’d pulled an all-nighter studying for. Someone was offering him a genuine invitation to come home to join his family on winter break instead of spending it cooped up in the group home. Someone was actually truly concerned for his well-being when he caught the stomach flu that had been going around and had to spend the day under his bedcovers in his dorm with a plastic bowl of his sick on the floor beside his bed.

It was unheard of. It was thrilling. It was hardly even believable.

It was too good to last.

Shiro had very early on in their – mentorship? acquaintanceship? friendship? – been offered the chance to be the youngest pilot ever selected for a manned exploration mission, to be the pilot to take a crew out to Kerberos in the far reaches of the solar system. Naturally, Shiro never could have refused that offer, and Keith was happy for him. He was. Really.

And he knew that it was coming. Shiro was prepping for the mission more and more as the launch day approached, and Keith was perfectly aware of how excited Shiro was, how big a deal this was going to be for him.

He’s the one who shouldn’t have gotten so stubbornly attached. It wasn’t like it was Shiro’s fault Keith didn’t have family outside of him, or that he hadn’t managed to make any friends besides him during his entire time spent at the Garrison. It wasn’t Shiro’s fault that Keith had started taking the presence of another constant figure in his life for granted, that he’d grown accustomed to knocking on Shiro’s door when he couldn’t sleep or texting him when he needed a reminder that someone still thought he was worth being part of Galaxy Garrison student body or having Shiro count the seconds with him when he needed to calm down, to take deep breaths in and hold them and let them out slowly until the world righted itself.

It had been a mistake on Keith’s part to ever let himself get used to it. To ever let himself think that anything was really changed. He could have kicked himself black and blue for having been such an idiot. For having grown so complacent in having a friend, a big brother.

And he showed up to the Kerberos launch with a smile plastered firmly onto his face even as he watched the best thing that had ever happened to him blast into sky. Because it wasn’t about him. This day, this event, wasn’t about him. It was about Shiro. It was Shiro’s day. It was Shiro’s big opportunity to be part of something huge, to make his mark on history.

The fact that he was even entertaining the idea of wishing that Shiro hadn’t left, had stayed here, with him, just for Keith’s sake, was horrible, wrong, greedy, thankless. Shiro was happy, so Keith was supposed to be happy too.

This wasn’t about him.

This wasn’t about him, and he was an awful friend and an awful brother for wishing for even a moment that it was.

He had gone out to town that evening. The cadets were always permitted to go out to town in the evenings during the weekend provided they were back on campus by eleven, but Keith seldom took the opportunity, and never had gone before without Shiro. But his dorm had been too quiet that night, even for him who loved getting peace and quiet, and he had to do something or go somewhere if he hadn’t wanted to spend the night sitting on his bed and staring at his phone and wanting desperately to message Shiro even though of course Shiro would never receive the text.

So he found himself walking down the lamp-lit sidewalks, trying to keep his mind occupied. He’d gotten himself a little carton of french fries to go from one of the fast-food places he frequented with Shiro, to nibble on as he peered into the buildings he passed, all either too quiet or too crowded and noisy for him to want to go inside.

He kept it up until he heard his name being called, and he tensed and flinched as he turned to look over his shoulder at the source, which turned out to be a group of Garrison cadets spread about a couple of tables under the overhang of a coffeehouse.

Never thought I’d see you out here without your bodyguard! one of them called.

What are you wandering around here for anyhow? said another. You lost? Owner finally let you off your leash and now you can’t find your way back?

Keith didn’t quite recognize the other cadets, not exactly. He was always terrible with faces, and names. But he had a pretty good idea of who they were and what they were on about. He had plenty of classmates who were far from fond of him due to him wrecking the grading curve, being pointed to by the instructors as an example the other students should follow while piloting, somehow earning himself the reputation of being a show-off and know-it-all on an ego trip despite Keith’s best efforts to simply do well in class without stepping on anyone else’s toes.

And the fact that many of them knew that Takashi Shirogane had taken Keith under his wing, seemed to be helping him with his work and backing him up when he should have been being punished for his various disciplinary issues, only made things worse. These other cadets were probably awfully happy to see Shiro out of the picture for Keith.

His hands curled into fists, but he shoved them into his pockets and turned around and try to keep walking, figuring there was no sense in letting them goad him, not tonight.

Oh what, still too good for us, Kogane? a voice called from behind him, drifting down the sidewalk to follow him. Still not gonna get off your fucking high horse and talk to us peasants? No, Garrison royalty would never stoop that low!

Hey, Kogane, how long you think they’re gonna let you stick around now that Shirogane’s ass is too far away to kiss it?

Looks like someone’s finally going to have to start doing the actual work like the rest of us!

They were baiting him, he realized. Egging him on. Waiting for him to lose his temper and turn around confront them and land himself in hot water. Maybe they expected him to be the first one to make it physical, although that wouldn’t matter; if it came to blows, then even if one of them were the one to start it, it would be his word against theirs. No one would ever believe he was only defending himself. No one ever did besides Shiro.

And with Shiro gone now, he would have to be careful. Without someone around who understood, who knew that Keith didn’t go out of his way to cause trouble and who understood why Keith’s mind would follow the paths that it did, he was back to the way things used to be, back to life as normal. If he set one toe out of line, it wouldn’t matter why, or who started it, or what had led to it; he’d be packed up and kicked out the front doors of the school before he could say a word in his defense.

So he ignored the taunts as best he could, drowned them out with his own flood of thoughts until he could finally turn a corner and get out of sight of the other cadets. The corner he turned ended up leading to an alley rather than another street, but that was okay, that was good. That meant there was only a dumpster and a couple of plastic trash cans to witness when his slid down the brick wall, shaking and biting his lip and trying to stay grounded but how the hell was he supposed to do that without Shiro?

And the moment he thought that he hated himself for it. Why did he keep thinking that way? Why did he keep thinking that Shiro had some sort of obligation to stick around for him when he’d already done so longer and put more effort into him than anyone else had in his entire life?

Who the hell did he think he was?

He let out a yell and kicked out, his foot connecting with the dumpster with a loud and satisfying clang. He couldn’t fight those cadets, no, but no one could get upset with him for fighting a big stupid hunk of metal.

So he went at it. Getting that rage out through steadily growing dents in the dumpster. Sometimes the dumpster would be those jerk cadets who were harrassing him out there, but mostly the dumpster was him, because that’s who he was most furious at. He was mad at himself for letting himself grow attached. He was mad at himself for having screwed up often enough at the Garrison to have wound up on such thin ice now. He was mad at himself letting the things those cadets had said eat at him, and for knowing that they were right. He was mad at himself for ever trying to convince himself that this was anyone’s fault, anyone’s problem, but his own.

He was mad at himself for desperately wanting Shiro back.

It’s easier to feel angry than it is to feel selfish.


	4. Chapter 4

The flag in front of the Garrison flew at half-mast on the day that the fate of the Kerberos mission became known. The officers and students were gathered into an assembly hall where a superior officer decorated in stripes and medals for the sake of ceremony broke the news to them, and was met with a horrified silence. Keith couldn’t know for sure, but he had a feeling the entire town shared that silence, that mourning, not long afterward when the story aired on the news and hit the internet.

The Garrison had found out about this the day before, but they hadn’t wanted to make the announcement until they’d already informed the families of the crew that had been lost.

They hadn’t informed Keith. Keith wasn’t family.

The superior officer gave a long speech detailing the mission, the progress made, and the pilot error that had caused the mission to come to an early end – Keith’s hands curled into fists where they rested on his lap, refusing to let himself imagine Shiro crash-landing, refusing to picture him making a mistake of that caliber, a mistake that cost him not only his life but the lives of his crew members. It was horrible to imagine, but it wasn’t as though the Garrison would lie, would place undue blame on the Garrison’s golden boy who they had touted as their star pilot, groomed to be the poster boy of the organization.

For the rest of the day after the announcement was made, Keith was numb, catatonic. He was only vaguely aware of the world around him. When the assembly was dismissed and the rest of the student body rose from their seats to leave, he stayed in his, staring blankly ahead at the podium where the superior officer had stood and declared Shiro dead, a declaration that echoed endlessly and painfully in Keith’s head. Another officer had to physically shake him by the shoulder to finally rouse him from his state. He rose to his feet slowly, trailed after the rest of the student body in a silent shuffle.

His catatonia didn’t fade in the days following the announcement. He talked less, spent more time holed up in his dorm, avoided the other students more, refused to meet anyone else’s gaze. Even for Keith, the guy who kept his head down and hardly ever interacted with his classmates if he could help it, the difference was noticeable.

A couple of his instructors were aware of his closeness with Takashi Shirogane, so they cut him some slack when he would stare unseeingly at the projection screen at the front of the classroom and not make any attempt to jot down a single note or when he wouldn’t answera question posed to him in class due to not even having noticed that he’d been called on. Others were less obliging to him, marking him down for lack of classroom participation or sending him down to the office. His Analytic Geometry instructor even pulled him aside after class the day after one of their tests to remind him that if he performed as badly on another test as he had on that one, his scholarship was on the line, and did he want to lose that scholarship and thus his place at the Garrison?

Keith answered that no, of course he didn’t, even though he wasn’t entirely sure whether that was true.

There was nothing to be done to relieve Keith’s state. He had never learned how to deal with loss. He was just a little kid the last time he’d had to, and his coping methods couldn’t exactly have been considered healthy. Looking online for tips was less than useless, since he just got a bunch of empty platitudes about death being the next step on a great journey or them being in a better place, or advice to turn to others in his support network to help work through the loss – a tip that may have been useful if he actually had any support network to speak of, if there were anyone besides Shiro he’d ever been able to turn to.

The Garrison had brought in a couple of grief counselors to talk individually to students who felt particularly shaken by the Kerberos failure, but Keith didn’t bother with them. The staff had announced their presence by claiming that everyone in the school was impacted by the loss, how they knew that future astroexplorers may be feeling frightened or anxious at the prospect of space travel now or how those students who had looked up to members of the crew as role models had been dealt a devastating blow. The grief counselors were equipped to help the students for whom the whole Kerberos failure was more a concept than a true event, more abstract than concrete, no true personal investment in the crew, not like Keith had.

It was the difference between students losing a favorite celebrity and him losing the only friend he’d ever had. They weren’t on the same level, and the fact that there were other students in the halls and his classes acting as if they’d been hit just as hard by the news as he had because they had posters of Shiro plastered on their walls and had watched all of his interviews and wanted to follow in his footsteps left Keith seething.

Things came to a head one day just over a week after the official announcement was made. His class was being herded into the simulation room, and apparently they would be running a new sim course today. The briefing for the ‘mission’ was sent to each of the student’s tablet computers, and they all at once loaded up the document to read. Keith’s heart stopped the moment he read the course’s title.

_Galaxy Garrison Rescue Craft 1V36T: Kerberos_

No. No way. They could not possibly be this tasteless.

Yet here it was, in front of his very eyes. The terrain in this simulation, the professor was saying, was modeled based on the images collected by the satellite telescope the Garrison had sent out years ago and that was currently orbiting Neptune. Great lengths had been taken to ensure that the likeness to Kerberos’ topography was as accurate as possible, since this was one of the simulations the crew for the mission used for training. Now the students were being given a turn, although with some tweaks for the goal of the mission.

Keith’s group was called forward, always the highest-scoring crew in the class, always the first asked to attempt or demonstrate any new simulation course. Numbly Keith complied, not quite feeling his legs as they carried him into the pilot’s chair.

The simulation began, and behind him his engineer and communications officer were running through their usual checklists, but Keith wasn’t listening to them. His thoughts were on nothing but the simulated sky in front of him as he flew through them, in a daze, the shipping bobbing up and down a bit as it went, not nearly as steady as his usual.

His engineer shouted his name, told him to get it together, and he refocused, straightened out his flight. He just had to get through this stupid simulator course, just make it to the end, and then he could zone out as much as he needed to for the rest of classtime.

The course went fairly smoothly. Their score was holding low by the group’s standards, but the performance was about average for the class as a whole. And Keith would have been perfectly content with that average score, would have had no trouble making a smooth landing and walking out of the simulation in as much of a daze as ever but none the worse for it, if his communications officer hadn’t announced that they were approaching their target landing site, the point of origin for the distress signal, and brought a zoomed-in image into Keith’s viewscreen.

The simulation was a rescue mission, and presumably for the sake of authenticity, whoever had reprogrammed the course for use by the students had added a prop to the landing site. A shuttle lay at an angle, slightly submerged in the rocky ground, acting as a beacon to direct them toward the landing site. The crash site.

Without conscious thought, Keith tightly gripped one of the levers at his side and pulled back, sending the ship into an upward tilt, flying away from the surface of Kerberos.

He picked up speed, tilting the ship further back until they were nearly facing straight up. The other members of his team were shouting at him, asking him what the hell he thought he was doing. Keith ignored them. He just kept climbing higher.

Then, just as the communications officer was threatening to bodily throw Keith out of the pilot’s seat, he slowed, gradually righting the ship until it was horizontal and coming practically to a stop mid-air.

Breaths of relief sounded from his crewmates, and his engineer started into a diatribe, calling Keith a few choice words and describing how she was going to strangle him when they got out of the simulation. She didn’t get very far into the spiel, though, before Keith started tilting the ship again, this time slowly angling downward.

The team said nothing, probably stunned into silence as Keith kept rotating the ship until the surface of Kerberos was back in his viewscreen. Without warning, he charged the ship downward in a nosedive, full-throttle, taking the ship as fast as it could go.

That brought the others back into action. The engineer screamed and the communications officer let out a string of oaths as he scrambled toward the pilot’s chair, grabbing Keith by the shoulders and probably preparing to make good on his threat. He had managed to halfway unseat Keith and pry one of his hands off the levers when the ship crash-landed into Kerberos. The lights went dark and the structure around them lurched sharply, throwing the crew halfway across the ship, the closest approximation the simulator would actually give them to crashing with that force.

‘Simulation Failed’ flashed across the screen, read out loud by a robotic female voice.

Keith was the last of the group to exit the simulation, and was greeted by dozens of pairs of eyes landing firmly on his, some suspicious, some baffled. The hiss of a few whispering voices were audible in the otherwise silent room, but Keith neither knew nor cared what they were saying.

The instructor was the first to address him, her authoritative bark of a voice somehow louder now than its usual, and she asked him what the hell that stunt was, what was he trying to pull.

Sorry, Keith muttered. Pilot error.

He marched past her and out of the room, ignoring her calls to him to get back here, class isn’t over. He was definitely going to pay for that later. Detention was in his sights, as was the possibility of winding up on disciplinary probation. But he couldn’t bring himself to be concerned.

His teammates were probably going to put in another request to switch pilots. They had done so twice before, under the arguments that Keith was uncooperative and didn’t communicate with them, but the team scores from their simulations were high enough that the officers in charge of team assignments didn’t feel that a switch was justifiable. After today’s performance, though, they just might be willing to start reconsidering.

Keith stormed into his dorm, hating the soft electronic whir and hiss of the door, hating the fact that he couldn’t slam the door and let the impact echo down the halls and shake the adjacent walls in its wake. Shiro had always encouraged him to go down to the student gym when his anger got to the point that it seemed it was going to manifest in physical aggression, so he could take it out on a machine designed to handle that sort of force, but he couldn’t do that now, couldn’t go down there. There would be other students there, and he couldn’t face them, couldn’t stand to be around anyone else right now.

Instead he only had the contents of his dorm as targets, and damn it all if he wasn’t going to make the most of it. Anything he could reach took the brunt of his ire, and Keith thanked his lucky stars that the furnishings in the Garrison dorms were so sturdy, otherwise the leg of his desk probably would have splintered when he kicked it and there would be a dent in his headboard where he’d struck it with a closed fist and his chair may have practically snapped in two when he hurled it against the opposite wall of the room and it crashed to the floor.

He was panting heavily by the time he sank onto his bed, his hands and feet throbbing, and his vision was blurring. Huh. He hadn’t even noticed he’d started crying, and he didn’t know how long he’d been doing so. He sincerely hoped it had started after he had returned to his dorm rather than during the simulation class; he didn’t want to answer the questions that would be asked if the latter had been the case.

His hands, he noticed, were shaking, and bunching them into fists did nothing to alleviate it. If anything, it only made the shaking worse. He was just about ready to shatter into a thousand pieces from frustration, and in a last ditch effort he grabbed up his pillow to muffle his face and screamed into it.

He wasn’t sure how long he kept it up, the screaming, but eventually his throat began feeling slow and raw and he lowered the pillow in exhaustion. Sighing, he set it back into its place and stretched out across the bed, deciding to try to get a bit of rest before the inevitable knock sounded at his door telling him to come out and discuss the consequences of running out on a class.

As much as he wanted to get some shut-eye, he could only toss and turn, couldn’t relax enough. His blood wasn’t at the boiling point anymore, but he was still heated, still tense, still seeing flickers of red in his vision.

It’s easier to feel angry than it is to feel grief.


	5. Chapter 5

He had been right in thinking that he was going to be facing consequences for the stunt he pulled in the simulator course and for walking out of class the way he had. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if he had gotten away with that scot-free or with a slap on the wrists.

As it were, he was sat down across the desk from the dean of students, and she outlined his current situation in no uncertain terms: his behavior over the last couple of weeks, while at least somewhat understandable considering recent events, still was not justifiable, and was unbecoming of Garrison cadet. It was beginning to cause disruptions in his studies and in his relationships with his instructors and peers. They no longer had any choice but to place him on disciplinary probation. He was either to get his act together, or he would no longer be welcome in the Galaxy Garrison’s academy.

He was on thin ice. The next strike to his record, and he was out.

Keith kept his head down as he returned to his dormitory after his meeting with the dean. It didn’t seem fair, that the universe should finally give him something good in his life, should give him a place at the Garrison, an opportunity to begin his dream career and set his foot on the first rung of the ladder toward being an actual successful, resectable person who can make something great out of himself, only for the universe to then yank away that foothold that allowed him to stay there and steady and ground himself, and to hold the threat of having the rest of it ripped away too over his head, dangling it before him, teasing him, taunting him, daring him to set one toe out of line and watch it all wash away as if it had never been within his grasp in the first place.

It didn’t seem fair, but it at least seemed in keeping with how the universe had seen fit to treat him up until now. Since when did anything ever have to be fair where Keith was concerned?

‘Fair’ would have been the Kerberos mission running smoothly, or Shiro never leaving on it in the first place, or Keith never getting attached to him in the first place, or him never having even heard of the Garrison because then he wouldn’t have to worry about losing it too, because you can’t lose what you never had in the first place. But all that was neither here nor there.

The here and now was Keith doing his best not to give the Garrison any reason to want to kick them out. He kept to himself for the next couple of weeks, which may not have been the best thing for him, because he had that awful tendency to take himself to dark and confusing places when he was alone, but he was short of options.

Keep his head down, hold his tongue, keep himself busy, keep himself distracted.

Keep himself distracted, that last part was the hardest. Kerberos was the only thing on anyone’s mind. It was plastered across the front of the Garrison’s e-newsletter and discussed in low voices in the halls, between students, between officers, between instructors and faculty, and it was front and center on the news broadcasts that played on the TV screens mounted on the walls in the cafeteria, the ones that were always tuned to a news channel, volume off and captions on, but that Keith had never really paid attention to until his big brother’s professional smile from hisGarrison ID photo was being slapped across the screen whenever he looked up.

He was drowning in Kerberos, suffocating in it, and he didn’t have it in him to fight it. He let the current take him willingly, pull him under. He clicked on the videos and news articles he’d come across when browsing the internet on his computer in his darkened dorm room, often finding himself perched with his feet up on the seat of the desk chair, wrapped in a blanket, that fleece one he’d gotten for ten bucks at a supermarket and that Shiro would always call dibs on during their movie nights.

The images and videos and text would flick through his head even after he shut the lid of the laptop. Kerberos tragedy. Lost crew. Crash landing. Pilot error. Pilot error. Pilot error.

The more Keith thought about it, the more he turned those two words over in his head, “pilot error”, the more they sounded… wrong. It wasn’t the repetition – he knew the sensation of repeating a word over and over until it just became meaningless sounds, and that wasn’t what this was. They were still words, the meaning was still there, but it was as if the words were taunting him, beckoning him to take a closer look at them but refusing to really let him see in detail.

Pilot error. Pilot error. Pilot error.

Since when did Shiro make pilot errors?

The words would echo in his head as he tried to fall asleep and were there to greet him when he woke up and they never sat right with him, not for a moment. But there was little he could do but watch those newscasts and look for holes that he was so certain were there but that refused to make themselves apparent, or study his classmates’ flights as they ran the Kerberos sim course and try to see where Shiro might have messed up, what might have thrown him off.

He asked about it. When one of the officers monitoring the sim course asked if anyone had any questions, he raised his hand for the first time in weeks and asked what made people think that the best pilot who had ever come out of the Garrison had made a fatal error on such a seemingly straightforward course, to which the officer simply replied that he’d meant, does anybody have any questions about their own performance and expectations on the course. He’d gone down to the communications center, the one that kept ongoing relays with the Garrison program’s satellites and deployed crafts and mission control centers, and had demanded to know the details of the mission failure, of the alleged error. They told him that he did not have the clearance needed to access classified information and politely demanded that he leave.

It was paranoia, that’s what it was. At least according to the Garrison staff who had to put up with him. And it didn’t seem so out of left field, did it? After all, Keith was known to be paranoid and suspicious and closed-off, the profile that CPS and the state had spent years slowly building on him stated so in no uncertain terms. He’d gotten better over the past few years, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t regress back to it.

The realization was a terrifying one, that he was starting to go back to the person he had been before Shiro. But as he grew steadily more reclusive, isolated, there was little he could do to stop it.

He didn’t have that connection to the world around him anymore, the one that kept him from sinking into himself, something that had gradually been becoming harder to avoid ever since the Kerberos lift-off and now seemed impossible to escape because it was just him, and God did he hate fighting alone.

He didn’t have friends at the Garrison. The closest he ever got was friends-by-proxy, those people with whom he’d sometimes socialize only because he tagged along with Shiro, but those connections had left him at the same time Shiro had. Matt had gone out to Kerberos too, gone missing alongside Shiro. He and Adam hadn’t even spoken a word to each other since he and Shiro had broken off their engagement. Every thread that connected him to anyone else at the Garrison in any way that could be remotely thought of as friendship had been severed cleanly the instant Shiro was out of the picture. Keith had been Shiro’s shadow, and what good was a shadow without the person who cast it?

For all this time he had been fighting to stay in the good graces of the Garrison, fighting to stay, but more and more he was starting to wonder how much he actually wanted to stay here.

Starting to wonder if maybe he was fighting just for the sake of fighting.

He was given the chance to figure out the answer during another one of their sim courses. The class was working the Laomedeia course, and Keith wasn’t flying at the moment, instead was corralled with the other students who were watching the current group’s flight, taking notes and murmuring observations to each other as the route and specs and scores blared out from the surrounding screens.

Keith practically felt his ears perk up when he overheard Kerberos being mentioned, and found himself listening in on a small group comparing this route to the one from the Kerberos sim. Pointing out where the terrain was near identical and which sharp turns the two courses shared.

Wondering aloud how, when Laomedeia was clearly the more difficult course and the student talking now had aced it without a hitch, the supposed best pilot the Garrison had ever produced could have fucked up so royally on the Kerberos landing.

It wasn’t Shiro’s fault, Keith found himself growling, and the other students whipped around to look toward him, unaware that he’d been listening in. He recognized one of them before they collectively turned back around, and the one he recognized, James, continued talking louder than before, explaining that he had known Shiro wasn’t all that he had been hyped up to be.

Keith felt his grip tighten on his tablet. He had avoided getting into any real confrontation with James for years, ever since that fight during his first year in basic training that had very nearly gotten him thrown out of the Garrison, but those confrontations had been getting harder and harder to avoid. Word had gotten out, apparently, about Keith having landed himself back onto disciplinary probation, and there was a handful of students who it seemed couldn’t wait to see that brought to his logical conclusion. Who would make remarks like that within Keith’s earshot and then eagerly await his reaction.

Thus far he had resisted giving anyone the satisfaction, resisted giving in. But the less he wanted to be here at the Garrison on his own, the harder it became to not give in to the urge to make alterations to a few kids’ dental records.

James was still talking, listing his theories about what had happened at Kerberos, and Keith couldn’t stop himself from snarling at him to shut up, he didn’t know what he was talking about, it hadn’t been Shiro’s fault.

Well, of course you would say that, James said. After all, didn’t Shiro have a full-time job of covering your ass back when he was here? Of convincing people that you’re some perfect little angel every time you went and fucked up?

Keith said nothing. One of the other boys nudged James in the shoulder, told him to wrap it up, he’s gotta watch the sim trial, but James kept going.

Must have been exhausting, huh? With how many times he wound up playing your goddamn defense attorney, taking falls for you, jumping through hoops. Can’t exactly blame him for wanting to get out of here so badly, get seven billion kilometers between you as soon as he could.

He was goading Keith, he was so obviously goading Keith, wanting him to snap, and other students were looking their way now, anticipating that inevitable moment of Hell finally breaking loose. And God, Keith wanted to oblige him, was starting to not care if that meant he was simply playing right into everybody’s hands.

Sad, isn’t it, he continued, voice light, casual, as if completely oblivious to the inferno he was stirring up inside the boy standing next to him. That Shiro had to die in order to finally get away from you. Then again, not exactly a shocker is it? Didn’t your parents do the same thi– ?

And there it was. The green light to no longer give a fuck about what the consequences were going to be. James knew what was coming, he had to. He’d done this before, he’d learned in the past what happened when he taunted Keith like that, when he shoved that knife in and twisted.

And when Keith yanked him close by the hair with one hand and brought a balled-up fist to his jaw with the other, he knew on some level buried deep, deep down where he didn’t have to see it that he was giving James exactly what he wanted. That all the right buttons had been pressed, that the moment an officer intervened to break up the fight he would be out on his ass and every member of the academy’s fighter pilot class would have gotten rid of their most hated competition, and all because Keith had been so easily baited, so easily riled.

The smirk that broke out across James’ face when he went down even in spite of what had to have been an incredibly sore jaw confirmed it, if bare logic hadn’t confirmed it enough.

It was a horrifying déjà vu, James Griffin prone on the ground after a punch from Keith, him being manhandled away from the other boy and marched out of the simulator room and down the hall. But it wasn’t the same this time, not really. Because last time, James hadn’t had that smug and knowing look on his face when Keith was bodily torn away from him.

Last time, Shiro had been around to vouch for him, to explain that Keith had made a mistake that he wouldn’t make again, that he would be better, because for some reason Shiro had believed that Keith could actually belong here.

Last time, Keith had suspected that he was about to be thrown out of the Garrison. This time, he knew it for certain.

He stood stiffly in place as the officers explained to the dean what had happened, and as the dean laid out what was going to happen now, what Keith already knew.

They allowed him thirty minutes to pack up all of his belongings from his dorm. He only needed ten.

And when a security officer escorted him out of the building to ensure that he didn’t try to cause any more trouble on his way out, he realized that he couldn’t give less of a fuck. He didn’t care what they thought of him, what they suspected, what they knew, what they expected him to do now.

He had nothing here at the Garrison, nothing and no one to miss. He had nothing outside of the Garrison, nowhere and no one to go to. So he wouldn’t think about that. He wouldn’t miss what he’d lost or dread the nothing that was to come. He would focus his thoughts entirely on how great it had felt to finally slam his fist into someone’s face again after holding himself back from doing so far so, so long. He would think about the heat in his veins, focus on the sensation of his teeth grinding together and on how tightly he was gripping the strap of his bag as he went to the student garage to get on his bike to leave for the last time and not come back.

He wouldn’t think about how no one would be anything but glad to see him go.

It’s easier to feel angry than it is to feel alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Do you have a tumblr? If so, you should follow [mine](http://justheretobreakthings.tumblr.com). It helps me validate my existence.


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